So if Smith is being principled, then properly stated, Smith’s principle comes down to this: That the government should not fund any research that results in code that some companies could not, consistent with their business model, adopt.
If that is his principle, then it follows that the government can’t fund projects that result in proprietary code (since there are some entities (say, the Free Software Foundation) that can’t, consistent with their business model, accept that code), or more radically, it means that the government can’t fund research that results in patents (since there are some business models that can’t pay the price of a patent). The only research the government could support, on this theory, is research that produces work in the public domain.That is an interesting but radical principle. The government funds all sorts of research that results in patents, and in proprietary code. So the real question for Congressman Smith is this: Does he believe the government can’t support proprietary or patented work if he believes it can’t support GPLd work? Is he advancing a principle, or just FUD about GPL[?]
If I had known this was what a career in law was all about, I might have gone that route: I just figured I’d end up spending a lot of time around criminals, and I was brought up better than that.
I think the horse is out of the barn on this one: NASA has been funding Linux driver development for years and IBM can bring its muscle to bear on the notion that corporations can coexist with the GPL.
Incidentally, I have looked on the MSFT packaging for the required mention of the Regents of the State of California, given WIN2k and XP used (and maybe still do use) the BSD networking implementation.